IMG Seminar: Plate Mechanical Metamaterials- The Thinnest Plates you can Pick Up by Hand

Professor Igor Bargatin from the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), will be giving an interesting talk on development of novel meta-materials for Nano-Systems applications.

Recently, they have demonstrated a new class of ultra-lightweight plate-shaped mechanical metamaterials. Using a periodic three-dimensional corrugation, they have fabricated free-standing plates up to a few cm in size out of aluminum oxide (alumina) films as thin as 25 nm. Weighing as little as 0.1 gram per square meter, they are among the thinnest and lightest free-standing solids that can be handled with bare hands. Like the nanotruss mechanical metamaterials reported by other groups, plate mechanical metamaterials are extremely lightweight and resilient due to their nanoscale thickness and microscale cellular structure. Ultralow weight, mechanical robustness, thermal insulation, as well as chemical and thermal stability of alumina make plate metamaterials attractive for numerous applications, including microflyers, high-temperature heat-to-electricity energy converters, as well as and hollow MEMS/NEMS resonators.